Ogham stone, Tinnahally, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Tinnahally, Co. Kerry

An ogham stone bearing a personal name carved in an ancient script of notched lines along a stone's edge is unusual enough.

What makes this particular example stranger still is the journey it took to reach its current resting place, and the layered story of inscription, loss, and removal that the stone itself carries.

The stone was found not standing in a field but buried underground, lifted from a souterrain, the kind of narrow stone-lined passage built beneath early medieval ringforts, most likely for storage or refuge, beneath a fort known as Lisnareabagh in the Kerry townland of Tinnahally. A man named Foley, an innkeeper from Killorglin, showed the stone and a companion piece to a collector named Windele, who acquired both and brought them to Cork. They eventually entered the Royal Irish Academy's collection, though this particular stone now sits in a National Museum of Ireland storage facility in Daingean, County Offaly, far from the Kerry landscape it came from. The ringfort at Tinnahally, which appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name Lisnareabagh, is the most probable original source.

The stone itself is made of clay-slate and measures 1.83 metres long by roughly 30 centimetres wide. Its inscription is a palimpsest, meaning it carries two phases of writing, though most of the earlier text has spalled away, leaving only the later reading intact. That surviving inscription, running upward then downward along the stone's edge, reads ANM VURUDDRANN MAQI DOLIGENN, a formula typical of early Irish ogham stones in which ANM signals a name, MAQI means "son of", and the whole reads roughly as "the name of Vuruddrann, son of Doligenn." These are personal names otherwise little attested, preserved now in a storage facility in the midlands, a long way from the underground chamber where they spent perhaps a thousand years.

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